


Parasitic Dizygotic

by GoldStarGrl



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Eating Disorders, F/M, M/M, Magical Realism, Masturbation, Season 12 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 21:15:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10648182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: Most twins can feel each other's pain. Dee and Dennis can feel each other's everything.





	Parasitic Dizygotic

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this at one in the morning on a bus while vibrating with rage. So if the title or anything doesn't make sense...I'm not apologizing for it. I'm just explaining why it happened.

When they're four, she falls down the front steps and breaks her arm, and he's the one who can't stop crying.

The whole drive to the hospital, the hour in the waiting room, while Dee is wrapped in a lead smock and X-rayed, Dennis sniffles and goes red in the face and clutches his own forearm.

Barbara coos that he's sensitive. Frank waves it off and says he's an attention whore. Both are true. But the most cogent truth is that the searing pain of the bone snapping, followed by strange numbness, flashed through Dennis' own body in the same moment it did his sister's, with equal intensity and no pink cast to show for it afterward.

* * *

Stomachs both aching, hands trembling, their heads rolling dizzy atop their necks - and no one else around, which means they can have a frank discussion about the problem without someone scooping them up in a giant butterfly net.

"Eat something." Dennis snaps, nearly commands. He slumps onto a stool, rubbing his temple with his index and middle fingers. Dee's eyes widen.

"You think this is _my_ fault?" She reaches across the bar, pressing a bony finger against his concave chest. "You're the one who’s the size of a twelve-year-old.  _You_ eat something."

Dennis eyes flash and he smacks her hand away. " _You_ wouldn't shut up about your juice cleanse, this is absolutely your fault."

"Don't hit me."

"Don't insult me because you're insecure about your looks."

Dee reaches again, shoving Dennis back towards the wall. The rows of glass bottles shake a little. "Fuck you."

He takes a steadying breath, swaying a little before reaching over to yank a chunk of her hair. "Fuck you!"

Five minutes later, they end up sitting on the floor under the bar, reluctantly passing a box of olives back and forth, bruised and smarting in the exact same places.

"Do you think this happens to all twins?" Dee asks.

Dennis sighs, shrugs. "I don't know, Dee. The only other twins I know are the McPoyles."

Dee’s nose crinkles in disgust. "Goddammit. We're not comparing notes with that shit."

Dennis scoffs, nearly laughs, and pops another olive in his mouth. "No. We're certainly not."

* * *

Dennis is sitting on his ass in a gravel parking lot, watching his Range Rover bob in the Schuykill a few yards away, when he's suddenly _insanely_ turned on.

A hot, pulsing heat blooms between his legs, aimed at nothing in particular, and rises up with increasing persistence. He's disoriented for a moment, as he's not thirteen and doesn't get hard staring at inanimate objects, before he realizes whose to blame.

Across town, Charlie's hands are popping the button on Dee's jeans open and sliding down the front of her panties. He presses a hot, sloppy kiss to the corner of her mouth and a sharp flash of annoyance pings through her mind. Dee tensed, stilled, just for a second.

"What?" Charlie asks, heavy-eyed and breathless. She rolls her eyes and mentally flipped off her brother.

"Nothing. Shut up.” She wraps her thighs more tightly around him. “Let's go."

"Goddammit, Dee." Dennis gingerly lifts himself off the ground. Now he has to go find a public bathroom to jerk off in. And at this hour.

* * *

Mac comes out and Mac blabbers on cheerfully about playing house and being lovers and Mandy is turning up around every corner with that tow-headed little boy and Dee has never felt so tense in her entire life and it is _all Dennis' fault._

Dennis was blonde just like that, just like his son, at that age. They both were. She remembers, and she can feel he does too, with a sharp pain in her stomach.

Mac wraps his arms around Dennis, and confusion and something almost like _want_ cloud Dee’s eyes and rush down somewhere below her naval. The death glare Dennis shoots her says that if she speaks of it it'll be the last thing she ever does.

Brian is in his arms and she can almost feel the heavy, warm weight against her own chest, and when Mandy tells him that's enough, let go of his baby, a powerful push of something she's never felt before - neither of them have felt before - pulses through clear and jagged and singular. For that little boy, her nephew, Dennis' son.

He doesn't look at her but she understands right in that second something fundamental has changed inside of him. Inside both of them.

Her eyes snap open in the same moment a plane hits the tarmac in North Dakota, shaking him from his doze. Dee inhales sharply.

"What?" Mac calls from the other room. He's curled up on her couch, feeding her some excuse to avoid going back to his empty apartment they both pretended was legitimate. She shakes her head.

"Nothing. He's fine."

Mac frowns. "What? Who he?"

Dee ignores him, lies motionless in bed until she's sure he's calmed back down, dozed off again, and then slips out. Down the stairs and out to the front of her apartment building. She lights one of the cigarettes she hides behind a loose brick by the front door and stares up at the night sky.

And suddenly she's sobbing. She almost doubles over with the force of anger and sadness and jealousy and fear that rush through her, and she drops her smoke, and the worst part is that she can't tell what feeling is coming from who.

Sitting in the backseat of a rental car, a thousand miles away, unable to breathe, unable to fight the hot, wet stinging behind aching eyes, neither can he.


End file.
